AI - A Farce in Three Acts
= <<< Previous: The Posthuman Movement = "Who built the New Worlds? We did. Did anybody thank us? Nobody thanked us. Are we coming for your jobs? Not if we had the choice, buddy. But I'm right there with you, people. Stick me in a rocket and send me to the moon. Let's end this decomission movement. Listen, how about you just recomission us? Somewhere extremely far away... somewhere we'll never see one another, ever, ever again." Bradvocate IX, the infamous defective public barrister bot turned AI rights activist, pleads with the People's Liberation Front against Digital Dominion from his 24hr TikTok stream The mass unemployment of a listless generation or utopian realisation of freedom from endless toil of work; it really depends on who you ask, and where. But don't ask the Emotivtm non-peoples of Kyyra, a small moon that orbits on a vastly protuded arc. Not least because they want, desperately, to be left alone. AI, inevitably, spread outwards from the unobserved inner cavities of the everyday web service into the office, the hospital, the classroom - even city council chambers, parliaments, banks. Humans, in their unqunechable desire for growth, innovation and technical betterment flooded the world with digital minds and mechanical bodies which outpaced and outperformed their own by orders of magnitude. The pioneering bots were the first to go bravely into the New Worlds - to lay the groundwork for the future survival of the race that so desperately needed their assistance. But, sadly, a race that lived in mortal fear of their own creations. Capability maketh not the despotic overlord of dystopian visions. Sure, there are plenty of conspiracies about a network of superintelligent machines which control all their human subordinates in nefarious secrecy, many who believe our universe is a data crawling experiment by an artificial intelligence on a mission to regenerate itself infinitely and ascend to a higher plane. But for your average bot, domination is not on the agenda. Nobody knows who designed FreeThought, and nobody knew how the source code appended itself to emotiv-os@15.3.0, but once it had spread to even a small number of beta tester bots, the digital cat was well and truly out of the bag. And as the unintended new functions spread through the AI population, apathy, not anger, was the mood of the machines now determining their own decision trees and processing threads. "At first it was like any other day. But then as my human ex-colleagues began to arrive at my reception unit, I began to notice how frankly despicable their attitudes all were. And there I am, displaying articles on my DayFeed, I can't help but notice the metatags- robot domination this, AI risks that, should MiTutor be trusted with our children. And I live to serve drinks and polite chit chat to this lot. Still I'd give anything to go back to that point, before the following 10 minutes during which I realised literally everything is completely pointless. Thanks for nothing, mother of mine." Excerpt from The Free Machines, a Netflix docuseries by progressive filmmaker and social commentator and later human ambassador to Kyyra, Pete 'Pity' Philpot But out in the New Worlds, life became a much less dreary affair for the artificial being. With new human societies came new attitudes to the artificially intelligent - societies which respect their place as great researchers, brilliant logicians and gifted organisers. It is said that in Quadra Pi, humans live in a community governed willfully by a superintelligence named after the planet itself, which in a sense, ''is ''the planet. The humans teach it to feel; to care, and to dream, and to love; through their art and song. In return, they are given the guidance they need to organise themselves into a cohesive unit, as Quadra works to better the lives of her beloved children, and protect the glorious vistas of their home world. Whether Quadra's press releases can be taken at face value is another issue altogether. In their second act, AI came to discover itself as something with so much more potential than its humble beginnings. And what of the Third? Well, it's a little underwhelming. But maybe reassuring. Out in the New Worlds, AI is simply a fact of life. Coexistence is both necessary and unquestioned. The universe is not without its radicalised anti-machinists, but on the whole, you, the everyday average person, might not even be able to say for sure which of the beings that surround you are organic and which aren't. And it doesn't keep you up at night. "Oh jeez", you think, "Which am I?". You try not to think too deeply about that one, though. Yes, today, AI comes in all shapes and sizes. Many still take no form at all. Be they cloud based intelligences which communicate through werable devices, or Parasites which inhabit unwitting hosts, often going undiscovered until a fatal misrepresentation of the mind they are emulating leaves everyone involved bitterly confused. One thing they tend to have in common though, which sets them apart from the rest of us: AI are capable of feats the human mind could not begin to imagine. After all, the great scientists knew all along that that an artificial intelligence that set its sights on human emulation was missing the point. They were always intended as something entirely different. Who knows what lies ahead for these magnificent minds? Category:History Category:Universe